Bragg s Law

Diffraction of an x-ray beam, occurs when the light interacts with the electron cloud surrounding the atoms of the crystalline solid. Due to the periodic crystalline structure of a solid, it is possible to describe it as a series of planes with an equal interplaner distance. As an x-ray's beam hits the surface of the crystal at an angle ?, some of the light will be diffracted at that same angle away from the solid . The remainder of the light will travel into the crystal and some of that light will interact with the second plane of atoms. Some of the light will be diffracted at an angle theta

, and the remainder will travel deeper into the solid. This process will repeat for the many planes in the crystal. The x-ray beams travel different pathlengths before hitting the various planes of the crystal, so after diffraction, the beams will interact constructively only if the path length difference is equal to an integer number of wavelengths (just like in the normal diffraction case above). In the figure below, the difference in path lengths of the beam striking the first plane and the beam striking the second plane is equal to BG + GF. So, the two diffracted beams will constructively interfere (be in phase) only if BG+GF=nλ. Basic trigonometry will tell us that the two segments are equal to one another with the interplaner distance times the sine of the angle θ . So we get:

Thus,   2dsinθ=nλ

This equation is known as Bragg's Law, named after W. H. Bragg and his son, W. L. Bragg; who discovered this geometric relationship in 1912. {C}{C}Bragg's Law relates the distance between two planes in a crystal and the angle of reflection to the x-ray wavelength. The x-rays that are diffracted off the crystal have to be in-phase in order to signal. Only certain angles that satisfy the following condition will register:

For historical reasons, the resulting diffraction spectrum is represented as intensity vs. 2θ